Living in a plastic world

Anonymous, the only people dragging ANWR into this are people like you who are
having trouble staying on topic. A cloth bag, unlike a water bottle, is used
many, many times. Most plastic water bottles I see are used and discarded.
They occupy space in our landfills, as well as are forming permanently gyrating
fields of ocean trash, in the center of every ocean. No one's denying
plastic's usefulness here; just whether plastic bottles of WATER are sensible,
given all of their down sides.

Anonymous

June 29, 2008 10:10 p.m.

The portion of the barrel of oil used for plastic would have been used for roads
in the not too distant past. While we need roads we needed a reduction in
packaging costs, improved safety of vehicles, and a myriad of other benefits we
derive daily from plastic. The cost of energy to produce a cloth bag, clay pot,
glass jar, etc. is more than the cost of several hundred Evian water bottles
(water not included). Then the reduction in transportation costs from the
lighter weight container. The reduction in insurance costs for repairing a truck
or car. Not to mention the savings in fuel costs for lighter weight vehicles.
Those are just small examples of positive benefits of plastics that far out
weigh the risks. If you are so worried about drilling in the ANWR, try putting a
postage stamp in the middle of a football field and saying it endangered the
beauty of the field.

Solution: Drill, Drill, Drill

June 29, 2008 8:33 p.m.

There is plent of oil to make all the plastic bottles we ned and want! Just the
D-News suggesting we should use less plastic makes me want to use more. Open up
ANWR and let the drilling begin!!!!!

Maggie

June 29, 2008 4:34 p.m.

I'm all for recycling, despite what John tells us! I do question, however, how
we can attempt to "recycle or reuse all plastic, paper, and aluminum" without
government policies. I can sort my garbage all I want to separate things that
could be used again, but until there is some place or some body willing to take
the stuff, I'm nothing more than a hoarder. Private industry apparently won't
do it, because it isn't a money maker. That leaves the government. In areas
where recycling is a way of life, it is because it is expected by the city,
county, state...someone other than private citizens.Without someplace to
deposit reusable commodities so they can be transported to a facility that will
break them down and process them into something new, I am simply postponing the
inevitable trip to the landfill.

Johnson

June 29, 2008 2:14 p.m.

John, calm down. Plastic is a valuable commodity, one we get from a barrel of
petroleum (which as was noted above, we also use to power our cars). It's
completely reasonable for people to question whether they should be buying
WATER, which is freely available in the pipes you mention above, in throwaway
plastic containers. It may not be as important as debating what to do about
Iraq, but it's a completely worthy idea. I think you are just primed to go
"off" anytime you hear anything that smacks of those blankety-blank
environmentalists.

John

June 29, 2008 12:36 p.m.

So what if we use plastic. How come all of you want to go back to the dark ages
and live in caves?

Fear mongering about disaster is a waste of time.
We are fine as we are doing. Certainly we have to tread as lightly on the earth
as we can, and be wise with what we have, but the heck with all of you people
who want to overturn what we have all worked so hard to create for ourselves and
our posterity.

You sound like that idiot Obama, screaming for change,
but never really saying what change you are talking about. I will vote for
someone who screams for common sense, but simply demanding change without a
definition is stupid.

Worrying about plastic bottles is a waste of
time. If you care that much, then do what the water companies did, and run pipes
to our homes so we can have milk faucets. Then, no more plastic bottles!

Leonardo

June 29, 2008 9:42 a.m.

Nothing wrong with encouraging people to not buy water in plastic bottles.
Unlike my bottle of shampoo, we can go through plastic water bottles at a
prodigious rate. Also, they fill up our (expensive!) landfills, and are made
out of petroleum, which I'm pretty sure we need for other, more important
things.

MetricWrench

June 29, 2008 8:56 a.m.

I think we all have much bigger problems to resolve first. Dave's idea would
never work. Imagine the environmental impact from extracting enough clay from
the earth and think of all the plants that would be destroyed for the materials
needed to weave a basket.